Modera Wealth plants West Coast flag with $750M RS Crum deal

Modera Wealth Management has launched a new phase in its acquisition strategy, expanding to open its first West Coast office.

The deal to acquire RS Crum – a Newport Beach, Calif., fee-only financial planning firm with approximately $750 million in assets under management – gives Modera its first base in Southern California.

RS Crum, which was founded in 1976 as one of the first fee-only planning practices in the country, currently serves more than 250 households.

Its nine-person team is moving to Modera, including Mark Rylance, Jon Theriault and Daniel Sexton, all certified financial planners, who will join as wealth managers and principals.

“RS Crum has been in business for 50 years, and we felt a real responsibility to find a partner who will keep doing things the way we always have: providing fee-only advice with a personal touch and a boutique feel,” Rylance said.

Modera Chief Executive Tom Orecchio said the firm already had a client base in the region. “We work with clients across the country, and we have a number of clients in Southern California,” he said.

The California deal follows two more modest additions Modera announced over the summer. In June, the Westwood, New Jersey-based firm unveiled its deal for Plantation, Florida-based Northstar Financial Planners, which brought $311.6 million in assets. In August, it acquired Marathon Wealth Management of Albany, New York, adding approximately $155 million and an entry into the Capital Region and Long Island.

Modera now reports $20 billion in assets under advisement as of Sept. 30. 

Vince Curtin, who was brought in to lead mergers and acquisitions at Modera in August 2025, has been quick to set the firm apart from larger and more voracious consolidators.

“We are very specifically an integrator. We’re not just building a platform,” he told InvestmentNews last year. "We lead with planning and we have a similar investment philosophy, which is evidence-based investing.”

Read more: Why Modera's M&A head takes a cue from Ted Lasso

The firm is following a patient strategy amid a crowded market. RIA dealmaking held near record levels in the third quarter, with Echelon Partners counting 125 transactions and projecting 510 deals for 2026. Excluding deals above $20 billion, the average seller in the quarter managed $1.7 billion, more than twice RS Crum’s size.

The RS Crum deal announcement lists access to Modera’s AI-enabled operating platform among the benefits for the incoming team. That platform, Mira, is a proprietary system Modera unveiled in October.

Mira is an agentic AI platform, meaning it's built on software agents that can carry out multistep tasks rather than simply answer prompts. Modera developed it over the course of two years with technology partner OnTrade, and it has been in use across the firm since July. 

With the platform's ability to pulls client data and documents into a single household-level system of record, Modera said it will help incoming firms consolidate their data onto a common system.

“We believe this integrated approach will also appeal to firms that have seen limited benefits from adopting individual AI tools without a broader enterprise strategy,” Modera President Joe McCuine said last month.

Read more: Focus adds Nevis as advisor AI tools face potential overlap

The firm said agents are restricted to the data they have been instructed to review and act only with human approvals.

Founded in 1983, Modera serves more than 6,300 clients and is majority owned by its employee shareholders.